Can Table masking be turned off? #12981

Description

As of Astropy 5, when astropy.table.Table.read() encounters values such as NaN, it automatically creates a MaskedColumn and the whole table becomes a MaskedTable. While this might be useful for individual end-users, it is very inconvenient for intermediate data in pipelines.

Here's the scenario: data are being passed via files and Table.read(). A downstream function needs to replace NaN with valid values. Previously those values could be easily identified (e.g. np.isnan() and replaced. However, now additional work is need to look "underneath" the mask, extracting the actual values, replacing them, and then possibly creating a new, unmasked column, or even an entirely new table.

Ideally, a keyword like Table.read(filename, ..., mask=False) would disable this behavior, for people who don't need this masking.